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Will not virtualize (eg costs outweight benefits)

Not applicable (eg using SBS, no server, using NAS, etc)

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Hi All,

Just wanted to see if your company/organisation has started down the virtualisation route for servers.

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Not started, nor planning.

We've only just completed a roll-out of XP SP2 so I can imagine we may get around to it by 2015 or so!!

I voted 100% - though there's no way an organisation can ever be 100% virtual (large production DB servers, for instance). We're about as close as its possible to get - 95% of the way there, running ESX on an iSCSI SAN (EqualLogic)

We are no where near that, although the company I work for is very server heavy in comparison to is user base, 1 server for every 5 to 6 people) the partners have been very lothe to, as they see it, "put all their eggs in one basket'

We managed to convince them to let us try virtualisation and have ESX running on a HP GL380 with a nice big SCSI array and a lot of ram. So far its worked out really well with 11 servers on their at the moment, none of espically heavy use but its working happily with 11 on there.

The problem we have is where to go from there, the main site would be big enough to have another VM host but the branch offices would not, so to a certain extent we are stuck.

I voted 100% - though there's no way an organisation can ever be 100% virtual (large production DB servers, for instance). We're about as close as its possible to get - 95% of the way there, running ESX on an iSCSI SAN (EqualLogic)

Click to expand...

That's the same make os SAN as we're getting. What's the management like for it.

That's the same make os SAN as we're getting. What's the management like for it.

Click to expand...

Awesome compared to the NetApp ****e. That NetApp Java WebUI is the worst thing I've ever used to manage anything - anywhere - ever. The EqualLogic is an absolute breeze to manage. We've had ours in running our VMFS for our ESX environment, plus some LUNs for Exchange for 18 months now and apart from one blip a couple of months back where a firmware bug knocked it out for 20 minutes, we haven't seen a single problem with it. Also, when we were lookimng at either adding a shelf to our current NetApp, or buying an entirely new EqualLogic SAN for our the database that serves our products we found that the NetApp was somewhere in the region of twice as much - just for the shelf of disks. No brainer.

What's preventing you virtualising your DCs and Exchange, Nugg? We did ours about a year and a half ago and everything's been rosy ever since. We absolutely muller our Exchange server as well - 400 users, hardly anything in the way of mail limits hence enormous mailboxes, something like 1300 SAN IOPS at peak - yet never had even a murmur of performance problems.

We have a pretty huge VM environment as well, although we don't have too many servers, I would say around 60, we did virtualize a good 70% of them... We also started around 18 months of so ago and we still want to virtualize more servers...

In our environment, exchange is setup in a cluster, we have the main physical server running exchange and we have the backup which is ran in VMware. I don't know much about exchange but from what I was told is that the reason we didn't put exchange fully in VM is because of the I/O of our exchange server.

I've just moved to a new company as IT manager and I'm hoping to implement virtualisation there in the year ahead.

Actually I've got a few questions and this seems as good a place as any to ask so I'm hoping the VMWare gurus can help out

The current setup is 3 physical servers - 1 x DC/File Print, 1 x Exchange/Backup/AV and 1 x Terminal Services. All on Win 2k so after migrating to virtual machines a Windows 2008/Exchange 2007 migration will be in order

My thoughts are to bring in 2 physical boxes with some direct attached shared storage (SAN would be nice but budget will be extremely tight so probably not an option).

Convert the existing physical boxes to VM's, adding a second vm as domain controller/wsus and leave capacity to expand by at least a few more VM's (SQL a possibility plus whatever other requirements may arise)

I'd probably split the VM's to 2 per ESX server, with each physical box having a bit of extra grunt so that in a server down scenario we can run all vm's on 1 box (albeit at reduced performance)

Question time

Does anyone have any recommendations for the hardware/storage to use? Cost is going to be the biggest limiting factor, it has to be relatively cheap. My experience is with Dell so I was looking at a couple of Poweredge 2960's with MD3000 DAS but I'm definitely open to other options

Backup solution - what are you guys using to backup ESX/Virtual machines? Ideally I'd like something that can back up/restore to file level for routine jobs (i.e file/folder/mailbox restores) - however in the future DR will be something I have to look at, so a solution to back up virtual disks would also be ideal. My thoughts are Arcserve for individual VM's and I've read good things about ESX ranger for DR

We're going to be using Windows 2008's Hyper-V, so can't help you with the VMWare or Citrix questions (just incase you haven't considered Citrix). However on the hardware side, we're most likely going to be using this: Intel's Modular Server. It's a Blade and SAN solution in one, you can even expand the SAN with additional storage.

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